With the exponential growth of multimedia traffics over wired and wireless networks due to the proliferation of multimedia-capable user equipments, monitoring multimedia traffics over communications networks is undoubtedly the most influential solution for congestion avoidance and achieving a tradeoff between the quality of service and the utilization of the network resources.
In fact, by causing queuing delay, packet loss and new connections blocking, network congestion severely impacts the perceived quality of service by users.
The recent networked applications, notably social networks and online content-sharing platforms, make things even more complicated as they bring massive amounts of multimedia traffic data to be processed in real-time. Hence, the volume of video traffic over communication networks is likely to intensify further and, even if rates provided mobile networks are increasing, the demand for high-quality contents is increasing faster.
Yet another problem of the prior art is that multimedia sessions between a client and a server are controlled only either by the client (as it is the case for HTTP adaptive streaming) or by the server (as it is the case for RTP). Hence, in both cases, the network is not aware of the video traffic and the control of any congestion in the network is left to the good behavior of ongoing multimedia sessions.
Furthermore, even if known algorithms for per traffic flow control are used at the level of the network, they become powerless as soon as a huge number of flows in the network should be simultaneously managed. The control system becomes very complex to solve. Indeed, avoiding congestion by simultaneously executing N times the same algorithm to handle N video flows at the same time is of unmanageable computational complexity.
Accordingly, more than one challenge is simultaneously facing congestion control over networks.
One object of the present invention is to propose an efficient method for multimedia content delivery so that ensuring for end-users the best quality of experience while taking into account the scarce network resources.
Another object of the present invention is to propose a scalable and tractable method for avoiding congestion in networks that are able to support a large number of multimedia flows.
Another object of the present invention is to optimize the delivery of multi-constrained traffics (delay, bandwidth, wireless access, and jitter) while taking into account most of the system constraints.
Another object of the present invention is to design network-level mechanisms for congestion control and video traffic delivery optimization.
Another object of the present invention is to improve the performance and reduce the computational complexity of congestion control mechanisms in TCP for best-effort services on wireless networks.
Another object of the present invention is to propose a method for efficiently streaming various multimedia contents to mobile receivers.